It's cold outside, better pour yourself some coffee and warm up with some Erlang news:

Enterprise Distros

Erlang User Conference - Call for Talks Open

AWK in 20 Minutes - Fred Hebert's Blog

Thinking Like an Erlanger - New Webinar with Torben Hoffmann on 29 Jan

Python Author Guido van Rossum Comes to Erlang Factory SF Bay

Connecting Erlang to the Sonic Pi

Package Manager - MostlyErlang Podcast

Some Performance Measurements on Maps - Joe Armstrong Blog

Notes on Erlang QuickCheck Part 2

Elixir Tools and Testing for Erlang - Mostly Erlang Podcast

ElixirConf.EU - Speakers Up!

LFE: on httpc:request/1 and httpc:request/4

QCon London Is Back! Save £50 with Erlang

New Forums on Erlang Central

Enterprise Distros

The Enterprise Distros are custom Erlang packages that include some extra applications used by enterprise Erlang users. We’ve been toying with the idea for a while, and in December we finally asked users and clients which apps would be most useful in their Distros. Following the survey, we now have Distro Packages for Ubuntu and MacOS that include rebar, rebar3, lager - 2.1.0, cowboy - 1.0.1, ranch - 1.0.1, cowlib - 1.0.1, gproc - 0.2.10, recon 2.2.1, meck 0.8.2, bear 0.8.2 and folsom 0.8.2. Next versions will include even more changes requested by users. Feel free to try out the Enterprise Distros and please give us your feedback.

The Erlang User Conference is back in Stockholm on 11-12 June (Tutorials on 10 June). Do you have what it takes to present in front of a passionate audience looking to learn new things? Have you made an interesting innovation, open-source application or product with Erlang/OTP/Elixir? Have you used Erlang or Elixir in a real-world project and want to present a case study? Or maybe you developed a cool tool? Let the crowd know about it and submit your talk.

Sometimes, Erlang nodes tend to die and leave a crash dump of 700MB to 4GB behind. If you ever get into the situation where you have to analyse gigabytes of files from 50 different servers without tools like Splunk or its equivalents, it would feel fairly bad to have and download all these files locally to then drive some forensics on them. This is where AWK comes to the rescue.

Thinking Like an Erlanger- New Webinar on 29 Jan The first encounter with Erlang is often a tough one since The Golden Trinity of Erlang - share nothing processes, fail-fast and failure handling - provides a mix of features not found in other languages. We will spend most of this webinar looking at how to design systems with asynchronous message passing between processes that do not share any memory.

Guido van Rossum is the author and Benevolent Dictator For Life of the Python programming language. He confirmed his participation on the panel debate for language inventors which will also include inventor of Smalltalk and Turing Award Winner Alan Kay, Elixir Creator José Valim, Erlang inventors Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding and Mike Williams andHaskell and QuickCheck co-inventor John Hughes.Don't miss this opportunity to learn directly from language creators!

If you're intrested in making noises with computers, there is a chance you'll be interested in Sonic Pi. Sonic Pi is a free sound synthesiser for live coding designed to support computing and music lessons within schools. Thanks to Joe Armstrong, it can now be controlled from Erlang!

What's the state of Erlang and Elixir package managers? Over at MostlyErlang, Zach experimented with a live podcast on a G+ hangout about package management systems. Users submitted questions via text chat to guests José Valim - inventor of Elixir, Fred Hebert - author of 'Learn you some Erlang for Great Good' and Industrial Erlang User Group Community Manager Bruce Yinhe.

Joe Armstrong takes a look at a seemingly simple problem posted on the erlang mailing list: 'writing a function map_search_pred(Map, Pred) that returns the first element {Key,Value} in the map for which Pred(Key, Value) is true'

Roberto Aloi got to work with John Hughes on modeling one of our ESL internal Erlang applications, using a Quickcheck statem. The application was relatively small, it offered a pretty straightforward API and its code was already covered by a fair amount of unit tests, with code coverage surpassing 90%. Roberto didn’t expect to find too many bugs, but he was proved wrong. In the blog he reveals some interesting behaviour for the application.

The first European edition of ElixirConf will take place in beautiful Kraków on 23-24 April. Besides the 2 days of learning and community fun, a full day of tutorials on Elixir, OTP and Phoenix is scheduled for 22 April. Among speakers are José Valim, Joe Armstrong, Chris McCord, Michał Ślaski, Jim Freeze and more.

Over on the LFE blog, Robert Virding translated Steven Proctor's demo of httpc:request/1 and httpc:request/4. The httpc module is Erlang’s HTTP 1.1 client, and the request function is a powerful way to make web requests using Erlang.

QCon London is a conference for professional software developers. Internet of Things, Reactive Architectures, Docker& Containers, Modern CS in the Real World, Taming Microservices, The Go Language, Product Mastery, Mobile, Open Source in Finance are just some of the tracks for 2015. You can now save £170 + an extra £50 by registering on the website using the promo code “ERLANG50”

The forum section on Erlang Central is growing nicely. If you feel there's a section missing, let the guys over at Erlang Central know. For a new Forum to be created, either many posts related to a specific topic will be organised in a new forum, or a creator of an Erlang-related technology/tool can request to create a forum as a mean of communication for its users.